


cherry red

by crashkeys



Category: Ensemble Stars! (Video Game)
Genre: Alcohol warning, Alternate Universe - Vampire, M/M, gratuitous descriptions of rei sakumas appearance, its legal alcohol consumption, this is actually just 3.5k words of flirting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-24
Updated: 2017-10-24
Packaged: 2019-01-22 12:29:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12481592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crashkeys/pseuds/crashkeys
Summary: kaoru gets stood up on a date. somehow that leads to him becoming a vampire snack.not that kaoru's convinced that vampires are actuallyreal.





	cherry red

**Author's Note:**

> this was gonna have a plot but then kaoru killed the plot by being too fucking gay. thanks kaoru.

The first time he sees him, it feels like he's dreaming. Like some fever dream made up of neon lights and pulsating music that's all beat and bass and no words, scored by the sharp sweetness of a drink that's part cherry, part vodka and part god knows what.  
In the club lights, the boy looks utterly ethereal, as graceful as a panther in the dance floor jungle of sweaty bodies that twist and tangle to a tempo that drowns out the sound of Kaoru's own beating heart.  
In the light of day, he would be pale of skin and dark of hair; in the shifting neon his skin takes on hues of purple, gold and blue haloing in his hair. His eyes are as red as the drink in Kaoru's hands, and when their eyes meet from across the room, Kaoru finds himself captivated.  
It's love at first sight, or maybe just one drink too many. Whatever the cause, Kaoru can't look away.  
The song stops, turning into something electronic and dreamy, and the boy takes his leave of the dance floor.  
He drops into the seat beside Kaoru, graceful even then.  
"Here alone?" he asks with a sideways glance, through dark lashes.  
"Wasn't supposed to be," Kaoru says, rolling the straw of his drink over his tongue, chewing on it idly. The straw is red, red like the drink, red like the stranger's eyes. "But it's been forty minutes, so I guess I've been stood up."  
"A shame," says the boy next to him, voice a low, syrupy drawl, "is what I should say."  
"But it's not what you're saying?" Kaoru asks, arching a brow. The stranger lips curve into a coy smile.  
"Depends," he says.  
"On?"  
"If you offer me a drink or not."  
"I'll offer you a drink if you give me your name," Kaoru bargains, earning a velvety laugh.  
"Rei. And I'll have whatever you're having."  
"Rei," Kaoru echoes, then flags down the bartender. "Another one of these, please." The name of the drink has slipped his mind, lost in the bored haze of the past forty minutes. He's not bored anymore, not the slightest bit. "I'm Kaoru."  
The bartender slides Rei's drink to him and Rei gives a murmur of thanks.  
"It's sweet," he remarks after a sip.  
"Good thing or bad thing?" Kaoru asks. Rei gives it another try.  
"Good," he decides.  
"Good." The drink stained Rei's mouth, tinging his lips artificial red. Kaoru's throat goes oddly dry at the sight.  
Red is the color of the night: the color of the drink that's muddling Kaoru's mind; the color of Rei's eyes, burning intense and heartstoppingly lovely; the color of the blood that beats through Kaoru's veins with a fervency that threatens to overwhelm him. In this drunk dizzy wonderland of color and sound, red is the only color Kaoru cares to see.  
Who are you, Kaoru wonders, and what sort of spell do you have on me?  
"Do you like to dance, Kaoru-kun?" Rei asks, tilting his head over his drink to look at Kaoru, hair like a midnight waterfall falling into his eyes and slipping off his shoulders.  
"Are you asking me to dance?" Kaoru returns, feeling a smile pull at his mouth. Rei stands, pushing his red drink away and tossing his hair over his shoulder. Silver jewelry glints, studs in his ears and chains on his clothes.  
"Dance with me, Kaoru-kun." It's a request, but it feels like a command and even if he had all the willpower in the world, Kaoru would still find himself enchanted and utterly incapable of saying no.  
"Sure," he says, dazed, "let's dance."  
Rei's hands catch his, cold in contrast to the heat that sears beneath Kaoru's skin, tugging him into the tangle of the dance floor as the music changes from sliding electronic to heady pulsing beat of a rock song. Rei follows the sound of the song with perfect metronomic time, gliding and swaying and stepping and turning  
and there's no difference, really, between Rei's dance and that of everyone else around them, but there's all the difference in the world. Like watching a tiger dance with chickens. Drunk chickens, at that.  
Kaoru barely feels himself moving, so transfixed by Rei.  
"You're staring," somehow, Rei's murmur isn't lost in the all-consuming bass of the music.  
"Am I?"  
Rei laughs, then takes Kaoru's hand and spins beneath it in a motion more befitting a ballroom than a club, and doesn't release his hand.  
"Yes."  
"You're hard to look away from," Kaoru blurts out, which makes Rei laugh again.  
"Why Kaoru-kun," Rei's voice lilts, "are you flirting with me?"  
"Yeah," Kaoru says, voice too loud in his ears. "Yeah, I am."  
The music doesn't stop, nor do the other dancers, but Rei does stop and it feels as though the entire world comes to a halt with him.  
For a moment, there's nothing but the hammering of Kaoru's heart.  
Then Rei grins.

He thinks - he _thinks_ \- he's the one who starts the kiss, but startings and endings hardly matter when there's soft lips and the taste of cherry back on his tongue, somehow sweeter in a kiss than it was in the actual drink.  
He thinks Rei is the one who drags him off the dance floor, with hands caught in the front of Kaoru's shirt, pulling impatiently until the lights and the people are gone and the music is muffled by the weight of the back door, leading out into an empty alley.  
Rei was magical to watch but he's electric to kiss, sending a thousand volts through every receptor in Kaoru's body and frying every intelligent thought in his head as well.  
Not that there were too many of those left after drinking all that booze.  
His back hits the brick of the building behind the club, caring little about the wall and caring much more about the person pushing him against him with insistent kisses.  
Rei's hands are still cold as ice, a fact that Kaoru may think odd if he were thinking at all.  
"Kaoru-kun," Rei breathes between kisses that wander from lips to jaw to the curve of Kaoru's neck. Kaoru's eyes flutter shut, hands carding through Rei's hair, which feels as silky as it looks. "Thank you for the drink, Kaoru-kun," Rei murmurs with a smile in his voice and the scrape of teeth in his kiss.  
An alarm bell starts to go off in the recesses of Kaoru's mind, too slow and too muddled by liquor and kisses to react to.  
"What do you-"  
Rei's teeth puncture the skin as easily as a needle through cloth, stinging like liquid fire injected into his bloodstream, igniting a panic-filled rush of adrenaline that ultimately does nothing. Rei's _strong_.  
Kaoru thinks: _I am going to die,_ as his body strains uselessly against the person (creature? monster? _thing?_ ) holding him down.  
And then, as sudden as it started, the pain is gone, searing sensation segueing into a strange sort of bliss, his panic melting away and tension leaving his body.  
_This is bad_ , says the voice at the back of Kaoru's head, a dim voice that Kaoru barely registers over the hot fog settling over his consciousness. _You should run_.  
Kaoru ignores that tiny voice of reason, even as Rei's vice-like grip on Kaoru eases and an opportunity for escape is presented to him.  
"Ah, you taste as good as you look," Rei's voice is a throaty purr, muffled as he leaves a wet kiss on the place he'd just bitten. "So sweet. I could get addicted to you, Kaoru-kun."  
Kaoru's eyes slide shut, a calm as warm as melted chocolate enveloping his senses.  
"I'll take that as a compliment," he murmurs, "though I think I should be mad at you." Rei laughs softly, pressing another tiny kiss to the tender skin of Kaoru's neck.  
"I'll take you home, Kaoru-kun. Where do you live?"

It isn't until they're halfway home, Kaoru's arm slung over Rei's shoulder and footsteps awkward and stumbling, that Kaoru starts to process what had happened.  
"Should I be showing you where I live?" he asks aloud, "I mean, you bit me. I thought I was dying for a moment there." Another thought occurs to him. "Why did you bite me?"  
"I'm a vampire," Rei says, as if it's obvious.  
"Ha," Kaoru trips over his own feet and narrowly avoids becoming uncomfortably intimate with the pavement. "Vampires don't exist. I think I had too many drinks."  
"You probably did," replies Rei, readjusting his grip on Kaoru. "And yes, we do. I'm nearly two hundred years old."  
"Woooow," Kaoru doesn't believe it for an instant. It seems like a funny idea though, the man beside him being impossibly. "You look good for an old guy. What's your skincare regimen?"  
"Being dead," Rei says seriously, making Kaoru burst into a fit of laughter. "You're very resistant to the idea of vampires. Which way do I go?"  
"Left. You're not a cannibal are you?"  
"Is cannibalism somehow more believable to you than vampires?" Rei asks with a sigh, though his lips are quirked up into a smile.  
"Sure, sure. Cannibals are real, sometimes. Ever seen that American movie? Something of the Lambs, I think."  
"That's fiction." Rei shakes his head, "you're very interesting, Kaoru-kun."  
"Sure I am." Kaoru agrees, "good-looking too. Do you have drug teeth? I feel high."  
"Vampire bites have a sedative property to calm our prey that has an effect similar to opiates, so I suppose that yes, I do."  
"Huh. Okay." Kaoru stops for a moment. "Still not on board with vampires being real, you know. So I am high? You got me high? I think that's illegal, you know."  
"There aren't any laws against vampires feeding," Rei says, as if that were very reasonable. Kaoru snorts.  
"Yeah, cause vampires aren't real. Oh, my apartment's in that building. You promise you're not gonna kill me in my sleep if I show you were I live?"  
"My intentions are pure," Rei swears solemnly, "I've sworn off killing humans." Rei makes the turn into the apartment building, a place nestled between an all-hours convenience store and a tiny bookstore. It was a nice place.  
Kaoru liked it. He did not like the four flights of stairs up to his floor. It was a challenge and a half to make it up them, even with Rei's help.  
"This place needs an elevator," Kaoru decided upon reaching the top, letting himself rest with his head on Rei's shoulder for a moment that dragged on far longer than he intended. Rei was perpetually cool, even after an exhausting trip lugging a drunk man up several staircases, and were he in his right mind, Kaoru would think that odd. In his current state, Kaoru's only thought is how nice the coolness of Rei's skin feels against the feverish heat that burns just beneath his surface.  
"Kaoru-kun," Rei murmurs, nudging him lightly. "Don't fall asleep here."  
"Wasn't sleeping," Kaoru protests, despite the fact that he was starting to doze off. "Just resting m'eyes."  
"Sure you were," Rei says generously. "Which ones yours?"  
"407," Kaoru points down the hall. "That one." With much reluctance, Kaoru stands up, managing the rest of the way without Rei's help.  
Still, Rei's hand lingered at the small of Kaoru's back, a gesture that distracted Kaoru and made the task of fishing his keys out of his pocket into a bit of an ordeal. After a solid several seconds of struggle, Kaoru manages to swing the door open.  
"I suppose this is goodbye," Rei says, and doesn't follow as Kaoru steps over the threshold.  
"Oh," Kaoru feels disappointed. "Yeah, I guess. Hey, you know- even if you bit me and scared the shit outta me and are pretty weird, I had fun tonight. So, uh," Kaoru retrieves a marker from his pocket, realizing a little too late that he has nothing to write on and, in a moment of improvisation grabs Rei's hand and writes his number down on his palm. "Call me sometime?"  
Rei blinks, then laughs, sharp fangs glinting bone white in the hallway light.  
"You're the most peculiar human I have met in a long, long time, Kaoru-kun."

His head pounds as loudly as the music that filled the club the night before. Kaoru groans as light slices through his bedroom like a knife to his senses, burying his face in his pillow in an attempt to hide from the sun and the ache in the head, to little success.  
What the hell happened last night?  
Kaoru remembers the girl who didn't show up. Didn't even call or text or anything. He remembers cherry drinks and cherry-colored eyes and-  
Rei.  
At first, all Kaoru remembers is dancing, remembers Rei moving to the beat of a song and Kaoru, in an impressive display of an utter lack of self control, kissing him on the crowded dance floor.  
Then he remembers the alley, the cold brick wall and the sharp pain of a _bite_.  
Sober (though albeit hungover) Kaoru doesn't know what to make of that.   
Wait, didn't Rei say he was a vampire? What sort of weirdo did Kaoru get caught up with last night?  
And... didn't Kaoru give him his number?  
"I'm never drinking again," Kaoru vows to his pillow. It's an empty promise, but Kaoru can pretend.

Any doubts about the events of last night and Kaoru's memories of them dissolve when Kaoru finally forces himself out of his bed and trudges into the bathroom, locking eyes with his reflection in the mirror.  
The Kaoru looking back at him has bleary eyes and last night shirt's twisted around his waist and an impressively terrible case of bedhead and, most importantly, two little marks on the side of his neck. They're not very red or irritated, clean little cuts that are almost surgically neat. Kaoru supposes that's a good thing.  
Though.. those aren't marks any human mouths could ever make. There's no other teeth marks, nothing besides two needle-like punctures.  
Weird. For half a second, Kaoru finds himself starting to believe that maybe he really did have a vampire encounter.  
But then that half second passes, and with a shake of his head, Kaoru decides that that's crazy and that he should just put a bandaid over these weird little cuts and pretend nothing happened at all.  
And hope the weirdo from last night doesn't call.  
"You can't just give your number to anyone," Kaoru lectures himself as he downs a pain reliever pill, and then jumps as his phone buzzes.  
Trepidation - excitement? hope? - flares through him, until he checks the caller ID and sees it's only Chiaki.  
Damn.  
Wait, no, not damn. Good. Kaoru's not looking forward to Rei maybe calling him. That'd be... that'd be weird.  
Kaoru should just call the girl he should have seen last night and forget all about the pretty boy who said he was a vampire.  
He gets as far as punching in her number, hand hovering over _send_ before putting his phone to sleep mode and tossing it onto the cushions of his couch, letting out a frustrated noise.

Rei doesn't call. Kaoru pretends he's not disappointed, and then after three days gives up on pretending and goes into full sulk mode.  
"Oh my god," Izumi, who lives in the apartment next to Kaoru's, says when he catches Kaoru moping over the lack of phone calls. "So you drunkenly made out with a guy whose last name you don't even know."  
"That and some," Kaoru mumbles, because he's prettt sure Izumi wouldn't respond well to the story of how Kaoru got snacked on in an alleyway by an alleged vampire.  
But then again, Izumi lives with a guy who's one tinfoil hat short of being a certified loony, so you never know.  
Izumi arches an eyebrow at Kaoru's words but doesn't comment on it.  
"So now," he continues, "you're moping like a lovelorn high school girl because he won't call you back."  
"It sounds worse when you put it that way," Kaoru whines.  
"It sounds pathetic," says Izumi, though not unkindly. Sympathy isn't Izumi's forte. This is more or less the Izumi Sena equivalent to a sympathetic pat on the shoulder.  
"Thanks, Senacci," Kaoru says morosely.  
"I hope he calls soon," Izumi says, standing up to leave. "At least so you stop sighing about this. It's pretty annoying, you know."  
"So harsh, Senacchi."

It's on the second day after that conversation that Rei finally contacts him.  
He doesn't call though.  
Kaoru's on his way back from work, exhausted and all thought of mysterious, biting strangers far from his mind when he looks up after retrieving his keys and sees Rei standing there by his apartment door, an almost sheepish smile on his face.  
To Kaoru's immense horror, Rei is as pretty as he remembered. Dark hair in cutting contrast to pale as white and fine as marble, shaped into elegant features that seem too perfect to be real.  
Despite himself, Kaoru feels his breath catch and his heart race.  
"Hi," Rei breaks the silence.  
"I was starting to think I dreamed you up," Kaoru blurts out, then cringes internally. "I mean, you didn't call so-"  
"I don't have a phone," Rei says. "They confuse me." A laugh escapes Kaoru.  
"What?" Rei's not only as pretty as Kaoru remembers; he's as weird too. Somehow, Kaoru's relieved about that.  
There's something charming about Rei's oddities, something about him that makes Kaoru smile without even realizing he's smiling.  
Shit, Kaoru's got it _bad_. He doesn't even know him, apart from the fact that he's a damn good dancer and that he's probably one of those weird goth people who likes to pretend that vampires are real.  
"I don't own a phone," Rei repeats. "I don't know how to use them. So I couldn't call you, but I wanted to see you again, so I decided to come here instead."  
"Alright." Kaoru doesn't know how else to respond to that. There's a funny giddy feeling bubbling in his stomach, an incredulous _He's real, he wanted to see me, he actually came here._  
A thought occurs to Kaoru.  
"How did you know when I'd be back?"  
"I didn't. I've just been waiting here," Rei replies plainly, as if that's a perfectly normal thing to do. Kaoru's flabbergasted and, somehow, not at all afraid. He should be, he's pretty sure.  
I must have the worst survival instincts in the world, he thinks, and proves it by opening the door and holding it open for Rei.  
Rei doesn't move.  
"You have to invite me," he says. "I can't enter unless you say so." Kaoru blinks.  
"What?"  
"Vampires can't enter homes without permission," Rei patiently explains, holding a hand out flat, as if pressing it against a wall that Kaoru can't see. Kaoru lets out an exasperated but not annoyed breath.  
"Right, the vampire thing. Okay, come in."  
"Thank you." Rei enters, casting an appraising glance around Kaoru's apartment. "It's nice."  
"Yeah," Kaoru agrees, proudly. "Didn't think I'd be able to get a place here without a roommate, but then I found this one. It's affordable and the landlady's a lovely woman too." Rei looked over sideways at that, smile playful.  
"Oh? Should I feel threatened?" Kaoru's face runs hot. Funny, he's not used to getting worked up like this over someone, be they girl or guy. Rei's weird in ways beyond his vampire thing.  
"Hey, what's that supposed to mean?" Kaoru's laugh comes out nervous. "Sounding like a jealous boyfriend, you haven't even asked me out on a date yet." Rei's head tilts, gazing at Kaoru through lashes that are longer and darker than any lashes have a right to be.  
"Is this your way of telling me you want to go out on a date, Kaoru-kun?"  
"Maybe," he says evasively, hoping to whatever God exists that his face isn't as red as it feels. Rei's lips curl up into a catlike little smile, and Kaoru is struck at how lovely those lips are, and how terribly kissable they look. "Will you bite me again?"  
"Only if you ask," Rei's smile is coy but his eyes are serious. Kaoru wants to insist he'd never agree to that, only to find his own protests hollow, and says nothing instead. "So?" __  
I'm the biggest goddamned idiot.  
"Sure," Kaoru says finally, "it's a date."  
The smile Rei gives him then is nothing short of beatific, and Kaoru can't find it in himself to doubt himself in the face of that smile.  
"Hey," Kaoru hesitates, "may I kiss you?"  
"Kaoru-kun," Rei says, very seriously, "please do."  
The last time Kaoru kissed Rei, he'd been drunk with the artificial sweet of cherry on his lips. This time, he's sober and there's no taste of cherries to be found, but Kaoru finds it just as sweet as his lips press against Rei's with a softness that surprises even himself.  
Rei's eyes are shut when Kaoru pulls away and not for the first time, Kaoru is struck by how pretty he is.  
"So," Kaoru says, when he finds his voice again. Rei's eyes, red as cherries, flutter open. "How does Thursday work for you?"

"You know," says Rei, after the seventh date, "I am actually a vampire."  
"Sure thing," Kaoru laughs, sliding an arm around Rei's waist and pressing a messy kiss to Rei's cheek. "Whatever you say."

**Author's Note:**

> kaoru hakaze you useless bisexual


End file.
